Introduction: writing boards and blackboards / Robert Launay
The classical paradigm
Styles of Islamic education: perspectives from Mali, Guinea, and the Gambia / Tal Tamari
Orality and the transmission of Qur'anic knowledge in Mauritania / Corinne Fortier
Islamic education and the intellectual pedigree of Al-Hajj Umar Falke / Muhammad Sani Umar
Institutional transformations
Divergent patterns of Islamic education in northern Mozambique: Qur'anic schools of Angoche / Liazzat J. K. Bonate
Colonial control, Nigerian agency, Arab outreach, and Islamic education in northern Nigeria, 1900-1966 / Alex Thurston
Muslim scholars, organic intellectuals, and the development of Islamic education in Zanzibar in the twentieth century / Roman Loimeier
The new Muslim public school in the Democratic Republic of Congo / Ashley E. Leinweber
Innovations and experiments
The Al-Azhar school network: a Murid experiment in Islamic modernism / Cheikh Anta Babou
Mwalim Bi Swafiya Muhashamy-Said: a pioneer of the integrated (madrasa) curriculum in Kenya and beyond / Ousseina D. Alidou
Changes in Islamic knowledge practices in twentieth-century Kenya / Rudiger Seesemann
Walking to the Makaranta: production, circulation, and transmission of Islamic learning in urban Niger / Abdoulaye Sounaye
Plural possibilities?
How (not) to read the Qur'an? Logics of Islamic education in Senegal and Ivory Coast / Robert Launay and Rudolph T. Ware III
New Muslim public figures in West Africa / Benjamin F. Soares
Collapsed pluralities: Islamic education, learning, and creativity in Niger / Noah Butler.